In the information technology industry, ever-advancing products, processes, and know-how places business organizations and other organizations involved with software development in a constantly shifting, extremely competitive marketplace. This may be so regardless of whether the organization is private or governmental, large or small. As such, many organizations require at least some form of change management processes to direct the management of incidents, upgrades, problems, or other matters related to the organization's software applications, regardless of whether or not these matters require changes to the underlying code of software applications.
In an organization's software development processes, development-oriented software applications are themselves utilized for design, coding, building, testing, implementation, change management or other stages of software development. Traditionally, improvement of an organization's software development processes involves addressing these development-oriented software applications. However, in many cases, upgrades or replacement of development-oriented software fails to provide the necessary improvement. This may be due to the fact that flaws exist in the development processes themselves, not simply the software used to execute the processes. This may be especially true in the area of software change management, wherein the process design plays a crucial role in the quality of incident or change handling. Other problems may also exist.
As such, there exists a need for systems and methods for assessing the status of an organization's software change management processes, producing a proposed scheme for improving those processes, and deploying that scheme to implement those processes. Implementation of these methods may improve the organization as a whole, provide additional return on investment, and keep the organization current, or ahead of existing market participants.